I just want to see small kitchens!

[Sonolanona]

We need a new kitchen...ours is pretty much as it was 24 years ago when we moved in (new door fronts but thats it) It's very battered looking now!

But we have a long and quite narrow kitchen and so far the showrooms we have seen all have huge kitchen displays with massive kitchen islands and oodles of space!
I'd love an island but the room isn't wide enough! I'm thinking of looking at Ikea as they tend to be a tad more realistic, but I know their units don't come with a service void and wonder if that's a ballache for installation?
If anyone here has an Ikea kitchen ..was it difficult to install? And if anyone can recommend somewhere that does smaller kitchen displays... please do!

We have a galley kitchen and have just had an Ikea kitchen. It’s lovely but the Ikea arranged fitters were shocking. Im
still waiting for them to finish putting things on it and it was two weeks without a kitchen and communication was pretty rubbish. However the kitchen is great and was very reasonably priced (under £7500 for everything including appliances and installation)

I’m finding the same thing. We are kitchen hunting. Ours is so small you can barely fit two people in it at once but all the show kitchens are enormous.

Wall cupboards as base units - slimmer can be used for glasses china etc pull out larder and slim narrow pull out spice drawers ( I use mine for jars and rolls of foil etc) . Get a few free designs done . Also don’t rule out a good joiner doing a custom kitchen - might be a bit pricier but if it’s your forever home and you really want to maximise space might be worth having one out to do a plan too. Don’t buy your appliances from kitchen showrooms either . So much cheaper to source them yourself and often get higher spec for same money

Our small Ikea kitchen. Keeping it white, sleek unfussy lines, and everything slim gives a greater sense of space to the room.

We didn’t use the Ikea fitters but had a local independent joiner-tiler-handyman do it. He’d fitted several so the lack of service void didn’t phase him.

Consider open shelving at least on one side. This will stop the walls from closing in. We used Howdens and have wall units on one side and shelves either side of the hob on the other. We sourced handles elsewhere. This is worth doing as they can really upgrade your look. This was ours after units were fitted but not complete.

That’s gorgeous!

That's a lovely kitchen (the colours great), but i wouldn't ever call it small.
13 x 9 but open through to additional dining space is sizeable.
Mine was 10x10 with the necessity of fitting a table in it, as well as a washer and seperate tumble dryer (welsh mountains, so having no dryer was just trashing the house with damp and washer/dryers are rubbish).

Thank you for all your comments and suggestions :) I'm not set on Ikea by any means, just want to see how smaller kitchens might look instead of big displays :)
I think a butchers block might be a brilliant idea... and yes Rightmove.. genius thank you! I'm going to a Wren showroom today to see what they have and will probably go to \Magnet as well (I suspect Howdens is out of our price range)

Thank you. I hear what you're saying....but a) it's all relative and is considerably smaller than some previous kitchens we've been fortunate to have and b) due to the layout with chimney breast (can't be removed even if we wanted to as we're listed), three large windows plus the 6' wide opening to the dining room, there's actually not a great deal of space to work with.

We admittedly moved the kitchen into this room because the original kitchen in a 1960s extension was barely 6' wide. That was truly tiny...imo, anyway 😉😆

One thing I didn't want to do was compromise on the unit/appliance sizes because of the small(er!) space we had. So, whilst we could have bought a 60cm wide fridge freezer/cooker and considered a slimline dishwasher and single Belfast sink, we took the decision to go large. In the same way that large format tiles make a space appear larger, we felt (and DH was an interior designer for twenty years) that tiny versions of everything weren't the best solution.

Very fortunately the second hand cabinets we found were all wide - so 700 and 1100 pan drawers plus a 1200 base unit we're using for bins etc. The only narrow unit (500) we have is the one reclaimed from the old kitchen which just happened to fit perfectly in the last remaining space. Imo several 600 (or smaller) units wouldn't look as effective. So that's my tip.

Absolutely love this

If you can get to pontefract DIYKitchens showrooms has small kitchen displays amazing staff and very transparent pricing the units come ready assembled so time saving our kitchen is 6 years old now and looks like a new kitchen still you do have to design it yourself but they take your basic design and can help with improving it, my kitchen is 14ft by 11ft and we went with L shape

This is mine

This is one of the most beautiful kitchens I’ve ever seen.

I remember @tiptoptoemaytoe's lovely kitchen from the 'show me your kitchens' thread where imo it definitely stood out as one of the nicest. What I liked most about it is that it's not particularly 'kitchen-y', so it doesn't have a clinical, operating-theatre feel. Instead, it's treated similarly to any other room, eg using a Persian style rug which makes it immediately welcoming and homely 😊
Same goes for bathrooms 😉